WHEN studying music, few young conductors begin at the beginning. The Gustavo Dudamels of the world cut their teeth on a 200-year orchestral canon, starting with Mozart and ending with Shostakovich. Rarely does a conductor with an eye on a mainstream career tackle music written before Bach’s time, works typically reserved for specialists and scholars.

Not Pablo Heras-Casado. For him early music represents the core of the repertory, with contemporary music a close second. Trained as a conductor of Renaissance choral music and soon steeped in the cerebral avant-garde, Mr. Heras-Casado, who is 34 and Spanish, arrived at Beethoven and Brahms only in recent years.

And after ascending several pinnacles in Europe — he made his Berlin Philharmonic debut in October — Mr. Heras-Casado has landed in the United States. Last year he was appointed principal conductor of the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, an ensemble undergoing its own musical renaissance with the construction of an impressive rehearsal and performance space, the DiMenna Center for Classical Music, in Midtown Manhattan. On Thursday he will lead the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra at the Mostly Mozart festival at Lincoln Center in works by Schubert, Schumann and Mendelssohn, a repertory relatively new to the German period-instrument ensemble but increasingly familiar to Mr. Heras-Casado.

“We’ve clicked so well together,” Mr. Heras-Casado said of the Freiburg. He has led it in two recordings of Mendelssohn and Schubert symphonies, to be released on Harmonia Mundi in 2013. “Phrasing and harmonic sensibility and polyphonic sense — all that background we have in common. So when we have a dialogue when rehearsing, we speak the same language.”

Trim, with steely-blue eyes occasionally masked by Clark Kent glasses, Mr. Heras-Casado exudes warmth but also intellectual rigor. In several interviews in the past year he showed himself to be literate in many disciplines, speaking eagerly about the architecture of Miami, Alfred Wegener’s theory of plate tectonics and the 19th-century layout of the Hermitage museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. Despite his eclectic array of interests conducting takes center stage.

Born in Granada to modest means — his father is a retired police officer — Mr. Heras-Casado first showed interest in music when listening to the children’s and folk songs his mother sang to him. He joined a school choir at 7 and soon pursued private vocal lessons. In an early act of encouragement, his parents bought a piano to further his musical education. “It was a huge investment. I was 9 years old, and I could just say after one year, ‘Oh, no, this is something I don’t like,’ ” he said. “But they supported me.”

As his training became more formal, Mr. Heras-Casado sang with several choirs in Granada, inspired by the commitment of amateur musicians, “people who don’t necessarily have any musical education — that enthusiasm of making things better and having fun — that has marked very, very much what I’ve done since then,” he said.

An interest became an artistic revelation when Mr. Heras-Casado sang the choral Tenebrae Responsories of the Spanish composer Tomás Luis de Victoria, discovering the intricacies of 16th-century polyphony. For Mr. Heras-Casado, Victoria is “the best composer of the Renaissance period beyond Palestrina.”

Photo

Pablo Heras-CasadoCredit
Sonja Werner

“The Responsories are very much madrigalistic,” he said. “They are pieces that he composed with no command. It wasn’t a commission. He composed just because of his passion, religious and artistic.”

Driven by similar passion, Mr. Heras-Casado at 17 founded the Capella Exaudi choir to perform Renaissance music, taking on his first conducting role. “I wanted to bring my view, bring my ideas, my energy to that repertoire,” he said. Since then he has not spent a single week without conducting.

As he grew as a musician, Mr. Heras-Casado widened his horizons, learning violin and dabbling in composition. He studied art history, musicology and acting at the University of Granada, though he never completed a degree. He researched the Baroque repertory of Andalusia, excavated little-known music by Spanish composers and even performed in a street-theater group. Lessons with the British conductors Harry Christophers and Christopher Hogwood helped him hone his knowledge of the Renaissance and Baroque repertory.

The bareness of much early music — its lack of dynamic or expressive indications — drove Mr. Heras-Casado’s musical development. “A very important thing was how to look to the four polyphonic voices, how to find within this simple, nude texture of four voices, with no orchestration, no instrumentation, no dynamics, no articulation, no anything — how to find structure, how to find phrasing, how to find the intensity, how to find the texture, how to find the colors. Just within the music itself — its maximum pureness — but also in the text.”

Though he said he’s not religious, Mr. Heras-Casado has engaged deeply with liturgical texts, better to understand their relationship to the musical structures of sacred polyphony. (He owns four different translations of the Bible and speaks six languages.)

Mr. Heras-Casado found a similar purity in the world of modern music. As a student he discovered a kinship with Anton Webern, who wrote a dissertation on the Renaissance composer Heinrich Isaac and whose music filters antique techniques through the modern 12-tone method. In 1999 Mr. Heras-Casado founded a contemporary-music ensemble in Granada, delving into Webern’s music.

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A big break came courtesy of an unlikely source: the avant-garde guru Karlheinz Stockhausen. In 2007 Mr. Heras-Casado studied Stockhausen’s “Gruppen” — an ambitious work for three orchestras recently played by the New York Philharmonic — as a participant in the Lucerne Festival Academy’s conducting workshop. A jury including Pierre Boulez and Peter Eotvos unanimously selected him as the best candidate in the summer program, and Mr. Heras-Casado led a performance of “Gruppen” alongside those two composers, both acclaimed interpreters of Stockhausen’s music.

For Mr. Heras-Casado the sound world of “Gruppen” was not terribly far from that of his home turf, the music of the Spanish Baroque. Working with the ensemble he founded in Spain, Mr. Heras-Casado had resurrected the polychoral music of the cathedral of Córdoba, like the “Miserere” of Agustín de Contreras. Written for seven “choirs” made up of odd pairings of singers and instrumentalists, the “Miserere” scattered musicians through the lofts of the church, with ricocheting antiphonal effects that prefigure those of Stockhausen by more than 200 years.

Mr. Eotvos admired the connections that the young conductor drew over multiple centuries. In an e-mail he wrote that “for Pablo music is music, whether old or new, and for me this is an extremely important quality: that someone does not make a difference between music from different eras when approaching each score.”

Though he rarely gives praise, Mr. Boulez was eager to extol Mr. Heras-Casado’s abilities. “I noticed immediately when I worked with him that he was very gifted and very quick and very eager,” he said in a recent phone interview. “That’s three qualities which are really to be appreciated when you are working on a piece like that.”

“What I saw was very convincing to me,” he added. “He has all my sympathy because he is not pretentious. He is very simple and matter of fact in life.”

Recognition by Mr. Boulez and Mr. Eotvos helped start Mr. Heras-Casado’s international career. He made his United States debut in 2008 conducting Ensemble ACJW and led the Los Angeles Philharmonic soon after. His praised first appearance with the Berlin Philharmonic paired classics by Mendelssohn with obscurities by Berio and Szymanowski. Mr. Heras-Casado’s Mostly Mozart concert on Thursday will mark his fourth appearance at Lincoln Center, after two summers of acclaimed performances with the festival orchestra and the International Contemporary Ensemble.

While pursuing the life of a jet-setting maestro, Mr. Heras-Casado has remained committed to the quite old and the very new, conducting premieres of major works by Marc-Olivier Dupin and Toshio Hosokawa as well as reviving obscure operas by Giuseppe Bonno and Luigi Boccherini. He has also maintained his ties to Granada, returning home when he can. Each year he climbs the Mulhacén, Spain’s highest mountain, just outside his hometown.

Last summer he conducted the Orchestra of St. Luke’s in a repertory-heavy concert of Beethoven, Brahms and Mendelssohn at the Caramoor International Music Festival in Katonah, N.Y., and received an enthusiastic ovation from its usually reserved audience. The chamber orchestra, which had not had a principal conductor since Donald Runnicles ended his term in 2007, knew it had found someone extraordinary.

“It is rare that someone so young can get as far as Pablo has gotten,” Daire FitzGerald, a cellist in the orchestra, wrote in a recent e-mail. “But he has such passion for his craft and such a love of music and, I believe, the discipline to do whatever he wants. He is a force of nature!”

Katy Clark, the orchestra’s president and executive director, said: “The concert was shockingly great. It was like seeing the orchestra in Technicolor.”

For a conductor not inclined to settle down Mr. Heras-Casado was struck by the ensemble. “The spirit, the approach to the orchestral playing that they have: they don’t think of the orchestra as much as an orchestra, in the idea that we have in mind normally,” he said. “But as a group of people they know each other very well. They’ve been playing together for long, and they are really passionate for it. They are making chamber music.” He accepted the four-year position of principal conductor, a significant career step though not a major time commitment. He will conduct only one or two concerts per year, split between Carnegie Hall and Caramoor.

Is a full-time music directorship near? A question about his dating life pointed toward an answer: “I guess I’m a romantic,” he said with a laugh. “I’m always changing orchestras, changing countries, changing repertoire, changing everything.

“It’s not because I’m not consistent. It’s because I’m just waiting for the right moment.”

A version of this article appears in print on August 5, 2012, on Page AR8 of the New York edition with the headline: A Renaissance Man, And Many Eras Besides. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe